Ron Drake
Let the Time Be Up
November 19, 2003

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LET THE TIME BE UP

November 20, 2003

Good evening my fellow DC residents, and especially those watching on Channel 28. I'm Ron Drake. I live in DC.

During the past nearly fifteen years of my work on behalf of disabled children, I have seen six superintendents come, and five go. Superintendents Andrew Jenkins, Franklin Smith, General Becton, Arlene Ackerman, Paul Vance, and now Dr. Massie.

What keeps happening? What keeps going wrong? Why does something always keep going awry in the selection of a superintendent? They always come from somewhere else. For some reason, this city, with all its learned people, is just not considered capable of producing its own leadership.

They all arrive, all heralded as the new beacon of hope, ready to set aright a dysfunctional DCPS. And it never happens. With the past as prologue, maybe we should learn from that past.

Three years ago the Control Board allowed the Mayor to appoint a search committee to make recommendations for the position of superintendent. Who was on the search committee? No one that I knew well — and I've been involved in the political fabric of this city for nearly twenty-five years. Oh, the search committee did have I think one limited public appearance to allow residents to voice their issues. It didn't really matter, because the search committee had its own agenda.

I remember so well, my dear friend Queen Mother Shema Yah making her presentation. The panel didn't listen and the chairman said: “Madam, your time is up.” My friend, with the aplomb we could all only wish for, smiled, looked all around to her supporters, pointed at the panel and said: “My time's not up, sir, your time's up” — to thundering applause. She was prescient by just three years.

Don’t let that happen this time. Let the time be up for those who don’t understand the daily hardships faced by those in the community that I serve. Let the time be up for those who ride on resumes, not commitment. Let the time be up for those who do not understand that there is another side to the river. Let the time be up for those who would emulate the Charles Dickens character Uriah Heep, obsequious to superiors, arrogant to subordinates.

Let the time be up for those who think that re-organization of DCPS is just a license to rid themselves of those who have incurred their disfavor, and then bring in yet more friends from Montgomery County. Let the time be up for those who would give Selznow-like sole source contracts. Let the time be up for those who, knowing that they have an extraordinarily talented Office of Legal Counsel, yet starve that office for funds and then budget $2 million for outside attorneys, at $6,250.0 per day of hearing.

Let the time be up for those who, when confronted with DCPS’s failure of a blind child, said simply “you have embarrassed me,” without so much as a backward glance at the plight of that child. Let the time be up for those who would fire a cadre of qualified hearing officers, bring in two who are egregiously biased and then force them onto unsuspecting parents.

Let the time be up for those administration officials who consider this Board’s Committee on Special Education to be their own private preserve. Let the time be up for those who would go to the feds and complain that this Board listens to a constituent, who happens to be an attorney.

Let the time be up for those administration officials who would form a task force to propose changes in DCPS’s Student Hearing office, and then freeze out those who have been in the vanguard for change. Let the time be up for those who were complicit through negligence in the theft of the teachers’ union funds.

All of this in God’s own good time. And then we can truly be about God’s work of comforting the afflicted, as Hubert Humphrey said, “those in the dawn of life, and those in the shadow of life.”